Patents per person by country

My fifth grader is learning about entrepreneurs and entrepreneurship at school.  Her homework tonight was a packet of questions whose answers are found via web searches (most homework, now-a-days). One of the questions was something like "where does America rank in patents filed per year?"  among the countries of the world that honor patent law, one supposes.  The answer is #2 behind Japan, according to Google.  I became curious about the data and created a spreadsheet of the countries with the most patents per year and their populations.  I calculated patents per thousand people and came up with this table:

	country	patents	population	(patents/person)*1000
1	Japan	502,054	127600000	3.93
2	South Korea	172,342	50000000	3.45
3	Switzerland	26,640	8000000	3.33
4	Finland	10,133	5400000	1.88
5	Sweden	17,051	9500000	1.79
6	Germany	135,748	82000000	1.66
7	Netherlands	25,927	16770000	1.55
8	United States	400,769	314000000	1.28
9	Israel	9,877	8000000	1.23

So Japan has almost four patents per thousand people; the USA is behind the Fins, Swedes, Germans, and Dutch with about 1.3.  But what do these data really mean?  Aren't patents and the patent system evil?  Does information want to be free?  I am also now curious about the number of individuals per country with one or more patents.  An efficient Google-Brain-powered patent adviser would  enable one person to file a patent per week or 50 per year.

Zero Day by Mark Russinovich

I met Mark at Microsoft and he turned out to be much nicer, more approachable, personable, and helpful than people there had led me to believe.  I asked him for the source code to ZoomIt because I needed to add an enhancement.  He refused to give me his code but added the feature in 10 minutes and gave me a private build!  He was always available to present mentoring advice in the “Software Architects” classes I taught.

When I discovered Mark wrote a techno-thriller fiction novel I put the title on my stack to read.  I just finished reading the book; it was much better than I expected and I have new respect for Mark’s versatility and story-telling.  The technology in his story is, of course, spot-on perfect as I had expected but more importantly, the characters, story-line, and pacing are very-well executed.  Recommended (****).

Stealing Light by Gary Gibson

I finished listening to the audio version of this book during my commute to and from work.  I enjoyed it more than some of the other “space opera” books, though the motivations and “honey trap” technology concept did not make sense to me.  I do intend to get other books by Gibson in this universe and I do recommend the author.  The characters were fun, the suspense and drama were well-written, and the plot was unpredictable.  The space opera tropes of a mysterious, ultra-advanced alien technology and unknowable motivations of space aliens were also well-presented.  And best of all Gibson does not inject as much British arrogance and political utopia as authors like Peter Hamilton. (****)

How to “mash up” Google Maps Street View in your blog

eBay Bellevue Office map and street view mash-ups from Google maps

  # # #

How do you embed Google Maps and Google StreetView panes into your own web log?  It is simple, really.  First, you embed an iFrame into the blog entry. The embedded maps above are inside a very-simple  iFrame defined as:

<iframe style="border-left-width: 0px;   border-right-width: 0px;   border-top-color: #ffffff;   border-bottom-width: 0px;   border-bottom-color: #ffffff;   border-right-color: #ffffff;   border-top-width: 0px;   border-left-color: #ffffff"   height="900"   marginheight="0" 
</iframe>

 

Notice the src of the iFrame’s content is a DropBox URL.   That file contains the “mash-up” JavaSript for Google Maps.  The HTML file for that DropBox URL is:

Of course you can insert Bing maps in a similar fashion:

And, I assume, the blog editing GUI tools probably have methods of inserting maps without resorting to typing the HTML and JavaScript text into a text editor.

Taipei Shanghai Zurich – Frankfurt to Seattle

The flight from Frankfurt to Seattle was bumpy. The food was good.  Movies:

• The Internship (2013): two old sales guys do a Google summer internship, Hollywood style.  Weak, formulaic script, bad cast, predictable, bad story, yuck (**).  Hollywood needs more scripts like “The Social Network.”
• The Way Way Back (2013): awkward, self-conscious kid spends a summer coming of age; worth watching (***)
• Frances Ha (2012): B&W, somewhat older woman follows her passion to become a professional dancer and choreographer.  Interesting, sensitive, well-directed New York story about young people, class struggle, relationships (***).
• I also saw a bunch of TV documentaries and shows (German, US).

Home at last!

Taipei Shanghai Zürich day 11 - homeward bound

Almost all flights out of Zürich are international, but no early check-in is required. Not knowing this convenient fact I was asleep at 8 pm, up at 4:30am, and in a taxi to the airport at 05:00. I had a 2 - hour wait in the Swiss lounge,  sigh. Yogurt and muesli for breakfast. Rain and clouds in Zürich. Sunrise in the air between the cumulus rain clouds and the cirro-stratus clouds above.

Taipei Shanghai Zurich – photo update 1

Out from behind the “Great FireWall” I am now able to connect to blogspot, youtube, google+.

The Evil Search Giant’s (ESG’s) has a wannabe Facebook thingie called Google+.  G+ creates #AutoAwesome photos (panorama, animated gif) from the photos in your Android phone that it steals thoughtfully backs up for you.  Here is one from Shanghai of the fireworks the night I arrived:

And here is another from the Shanghai dinner riverboat cruise Friday night:

I am slowly copying the other #AutoAwesome photos to their dated folders on skydrive where I share photos publicly.

Taipei 1  -  Taipei 2   -  Shanghai Riverboat 1  -  Shanghai Riverboat 2

Shanghai to Zurich  -  Zurich

And I dumped all the videos from my phone (without viewing them) to You-Tub-bee:

 

 

 

 

 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=spwBZY4tfZk

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4PzNfUAAl0E

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hUTIVuUUvPw

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G6aj85qqOFU

 

Windows Live Writer sometimes pastes a youtube link as a thumbnail (embedded link) and other times as a naked URI.

Taipei Shanghai Zurich Day 10 – visiting the in-laws

Here is a link of all the photos I took Sunday with my family here in Zurich.  It was spectacular weather and the views of the Alps from Zurihorn were breathtaking!

 

All of my nephews are happy, fun-loving bundles of joy.  I lost a foot race to Livio but got my revenge at the Fooseball table after dinner.

 

Lots more pictures here: http://sdrv.ms/16ZaUwT .  I am hoping Google+ will create panoramas and animated gifs in the #AutoAwesome feature that I can share.  The Evil Search Giant (ESG) is really creepy, “backing up” (stealing) all of the photos from my Android phone.

[Update ] It appears you must log in to Google+ to see the photos it creates with #AutoAwesome.  However it does allow me to download the animated Gif’s and panorama’s it creates so I can manually add them to my collection.